{"id":1349,"date":"2017-02-24T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-02-24T14:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2017-02-24T07:57:24","modified_gmt":"2017-02-24T15:57:24","slug":"a-trip-down-memory-lane-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2017\/02\/24\/a-trip-down-memory-lane-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Trip Down Memory Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Hill<\/p><\/div>\n

Every once in a while it\u2019s a good idea to take a trip down memory lane and go back to one\u2019s roots.\u00a0 This week, with my daughter and grandson in town for a visit, we took just such a trip\u2014back to Three Points and to the place I lived for five years during the time my first husband and I were teaching on the Tohono O\u2019odham reservation.<\/p>\n

Teachers in the Indian Oasis School District were expected to live in teacher housing\u2014a clump of slump-block homes built into a neighborhood near the school.\u00a0 It was referred to, and rightly so, as The Fishbowl.\u00a0 I took one look at it, stomped my size eleven shoe and said, \u201cNo, way Jos\u00e9!! I\u2019m not living there!\u201d<\/p>\n

My husband, who enjoyed spending time prospecting, somehow came up with a possible alternative.\u00a0 The house, built on a knoll on the King\u2019s Anvil Ranch west of Three Points, had previously been used as quarters for ranch hands and their families.\u00a0 The owner, John King, was willing to rent it to us for the princely sum of $40 a month.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s just say it was humble pie\u2014a total of five rooms including kitchen, laundry room, living room, bathroom and bedroom\u2014built in a long narrow style that wasn\u2019t a mobile home but could just as well have been.\u00a0 It was made of brick with concrete floors\u2014no tile and zero insulation\u2014and two vestigial wall heaters,one in the living room and one in the bedroom, that operated on propane.\u00a0 If you wanted more heat than that, you could always light a fire in the wood-burning fireplace.<\/p>\n

The house was two miles of rough dirt track off Highway 86 and our turn-off was thirty miles from the school where we both taught. But that thirty mile commute meant thirty miles of travel at a minimum of sixty miles an hour.\u00a0 We considered it a traffic jam if we got caught behind a school bus or if there were cattle loose on the highway.\u00a0 It took ten minutes to negotiate the tricky two miles of dirt road, and then thirty minutes flat from the turnoff on.\u00a0 So forty minutes altogether, beginning to end.\u00a0 There are probably a lot of people reading who are laughing aloud about now because they currently have far worse and far more stressful daily commutes.<\/p>\n

During our move-in process, accomplished with a collection of friends and pickup trucks, the washing machine and refrigerator we had inherited from my husband\u2019s deceased grandmother, were both placed on their sides.\u00a0 In terms of moving mechanical equipment, this is not a recommended practice. The previously frost-free refrigerator immediately decided it was really a freezer in disguise and started freezing any vegetable material we attempted to store inside it.\u00a0 As for the formerly automatic washer?\u00a0 From the time it was once again upright, it had transformed into a semi-automatic washer.\u00a0 How exactly does a semi-automatic washer operate?\u00a0 By someone using five gallon buckets to carry water from the kitchen sink for both washing and rinsing. As for a dryer?\u00a0Fugetaboutit!\u00a0 With no 220 electrical service on the premises, the dryer was a clothes line out back. On those occasions when the wind blew hard enough, I found myself on the back of the hill plucking downed laundry items off rocks and prickly pear.<\/p>\n

A few months later, during a severe thunderstorm, the semi-automatic washing machine was struck by lightning.\u00a0 I told my then husband, and you may quote me:\u00a0 If God had wanted me to do laundry, She wouldn\u2019t have struck my washing machine with lightning!\u201d From then on, we took our laundry to the laundromat on our way to school on Thursday mornings and picked it up after school, washed, folded, and ironed where necessary.\u00a0 Was that a great deal or what?<\/p>\n

But back to the house.\u00a0 Remember that two-mile long dirt track I mentioned?\u00a0 Two separate washes crossed the road\u2014a narrow deep one and a wide sandy one\u2014both of which could become entirely impassible during and after severe thunderstorms.\u00a0 When that happened, we parked the cars on one side or the other and walked. \u00a0Our telephone was the pay phone seven miles away at the trading post at Three Points. Water came from a well at the base of the hill that was there primarily to fill a watering tank for livestock.\u00a0 It operated on a gas-powered, rope-pull pump that forced water from the well up the hill to where it was stored an elevated water tank that had been built at the back of the house.\u00a0 There was no gauge on the tank, so running out of water at inconvenient times was a common occurrence.<\/p>\n

With the nearest neighbor miles away, you can bet there was wildlife a plenty\u2014coyotes, coatimundis, javelina.\u00a0 We found at least one rattlesnake in the yard every year, including one resting on the wall inside our screened-in back porch one afternoon when I came home late after a pre-natal checkup in Tucson.\u00a0 Scary.\u00a0 That\u2019s where we were still living a few months later when my daughter was born. The reality of those rattlesnake neighbors living all around us is one of the reasons we left what we called \u201cThe Hill\u201d when our daughter was approximately seven months old. A toddler and rattlesnakes? Not gonna happen!<\/p>\n

This weekend when my daughter, my grandson and I went to Three Points, we drove past The Hill, not on the road we used to use because that one has been blocked off, but on a still rugged and mostly not-maintained county road.\u00a0 As afternoon sunlight glinted off the white brick of the west-facing house, it clear it was still all there\u2014water tank and all\u2014standing in splendid isolation.\u00a0 We stopped and took a photo or two.\u00a0 I doubt that the photos will duplicate well, but you\u2019ll get the idea.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where I lived when I started writing, whiling away the long lonely evening hours by jotting off bits and pieces of heartbreaking poetry, while my husband sat passed out in his recliner in front of a blaring TV set.\u00a0 Many of those poems, available in my book of poetry, After the Fire, predate my husband\u2019s death from chronic alcoholism by a good dozen years.<\/p>\n

One of those poems in particular has been close to my heart as I\u2019ve been writing these words:<\/p>\n

Homestead Revisited<\/p>\n

A windswept house on barren lava flow<\/em><\/p>\n

Surveys the desert floor for miles around.<\/em><\/p>\n

To this unlikely spot whose beauty none but we <\/em><\/p>\n

Could well discern, we brought our new-made vows <\/em><\/p>\n

And love.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We were each other’s all in all.<\/em><\/p>\n

It was enough, at least at first.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then small erosions came<\/em><\/p>\n

To sweep us from our perch.<\/em><\/p>\n

The house still stands.<\/em><\/p>\n

Only we<\/em><\/p>\n

Are gone.<\/em><\/p>\n

I wrote these words more than thirty years ago now, but they remain true to this day:<\/p>\n

The house still stands.<\/em><\/p>\n

Only we are gone.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every once in a while it\u2019s a good idea to take a trip down memory lane and go back to one\u2019s roots.\u00a0 This week, with my daughter and grandson in town for a visit, we took just such a trip\u2014back to Three Points and to the place I lived for five years during the time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-tucson"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-lL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1355,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions\/1355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}